The Newest Search Engine: Google Caffeine

Around the first of August word began spreading about Google’s newest generation of search engine, tentatively named Caffeine. If you haven’t heard of Caffeine yet don’t feel bad. Google is still only in testing mode and has been keeping the whole thing pretty quiet.

But knowing Google it won’t be a secret for long. Caffeine is an attempt to keep the market share Bing and Yahoo have teamed up to take from them. It’s also Google’s attempt to build a fast, better, and more accurate Search Engine. According to Google’s official blog:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”*

So how does it stack up? Mashable, a popular Blog, did a detailed test of the new engine. They found that it was faster, and more accurate than the old version of Google. For instance, a search for the definition of dog brought back 359,000,000 results in .12 seconds on Caffeine. On the old it only brought 51,900,000 and took .25 seconds.

How Caffeine will affect the future of Search Engines remains to be seen, but the early reports seem to indicate that Google is raising the bar yet again. At the very least, we can all look forward to searches getting faster and more accurate, and no one would argue that’s a bad thing.